Wild Rose
by Ink Cat
Summary: A woman's body is found in Central Park among the roses. A mysterious aspect to the murder leads detectives on a search, and finds a victim, and a killer, who aren't what they seem, and a motive that's just as terrible as the murder. Casefile ship.
1. Chapter 1

_Wild Rose_

Well, this is the first time that I've ever written a CI fic. I intend for it to go on for a while, but I won't make any promises, since I'm infamous for starting things and not finishing them. This one, though, I'm definitely feeling, at least for the time being. Maybe a few good reviews will urge me to write more... hint-wink-nudge. Anyway, Wild Rose is a casefile. With shipness. I'm sure you can guess who, seeing as how CI only follows one man and one woman. What? Noth and Sciorra? No, they're on my ignore list. Not because I dislike them, but because I'm a stubborn girl unwilling to let anyone else into my circle. It's nothing personal. I hate Sophia just as much. XD

Disclaimer: Not. Mine.

………

Emmatwirled. Oh, she felt so wonderful. Her hair fell around her face in spiral tendrils of a soft chocolate brown and her dress swirled around her legs like a velvet breeze. She had never felt more beautiful, more feminine and alive. The stars were out over her head as the city wound down from a night of excitement.

She threw a playful glance over her shoulder at the man whose hand she held. He smiled back, and tugged her hand. Then they were running, giggling, into a dark area. _Central Park,_ she realized. Their breath was short from laughing. The grasses brushed at their legs, and the air was peppered with the sounds of the night. The city's noise was fading away, the cars and the voices, and it was just the hum of insects and the rustling of animals bedding down in the trees and bush. They stumbled, slowing to a stop, near the sloping sides of the river. She grinned at him widely, or rather at his shape in the darkness. His form moved towards her and she slipped into his arms willingly. Their lips met, touched for a moment. She felt hands along her throat, caressing softly. But then…

The hands tightened, gripped around her windpipe. Her shock was immediate; she tried to scream, but her lungs were burning, no air, no _air!_

She was so confused, why was he doing this to her? What was happening? She slipped limply to the ground, his hands still around her throat. He leant down above her and brushed a kiss across her cheek, whispered in her ear. Sharp barbs dug into her back, but she was frozen, asphyxia beginning to take its toll on her body. Her pupils widened in the dark until they nearly blotted out the grey irises of her eyes. In that moment, light poured into her optical nerves, and she caught a last glimpse of his face and his arm raised above her before the world jolted into sickening darkness with a dull thud.

………

Alex was curled in his arms; her head nestled comfortably beneath his chin. There was a book in their lap, a thick and weathered volume that they both read from, and a cream-colored fleece blanket wrapped around them.

The room was silent except for the ticking of the clock and the methodical rustle of turning pages. The rain beat against the wide windows with a soft hush, melting the city into a soft gray blur. Every so often he brushed a kiss atop the crown of her head, so gently that she hardly noticed. She leaned back into the comforting warmth of his body, pulling the blanket tighter around them, and looked up into his eyes. Alex raised her head, their mouths drawing closer. Their breathing slowed, the trace of a smile on both of their lips.

In the back of her head she heard an abrasive noise, but pushed it away.

Alex sighed contentedly, her hand curling around his on the yellowed pages. His other hand fluttered softly along the line of her jaw, gently pushing away a lock of hair.

The sound persisted, and her reality fractured just a bit.

Their lips hovered a breath apart, their eyes meeting warmly. The tension was… exquisite torture. They silently dared each other. Will you break first? Will I? Simultaneously, they decided to give in. She turned her head slightly, moved up to meet his lips with hers...

And was thrown violently into wakefulness by the harsh ringing of her cell phone. She moaned, pushing her hair back from her forehead and snatching the phone off of the bedside table simultaneously. She flipped it open with a snap. "Eames."

Deakins' voice sounded processed through the small speaker. "Alex, are you sleeping?"

_Obviously not, thanks to you. _"I'm awake. What's up?"

"DB in Central Park. Goren's already there."

"Where in Central Park?"

"Below the Bow Bridge."

"All right. I'll be there in a few. Bye."

She snapped the phone shut. Running a hand through her hair, she let her breath out in a huff. "Fuck." It was just her luck that she'd been woken up in the middle of that dream. She'd had it so many times before, and yet she still couldn't say who she was with. Somehow she felt that if she kissed him, just pressed her lips to his, she'd know who he was, or… she didn't know. It seemed that the recurring dream had been leading up to that moment for years. She always awoke before she had the chance to do that simple act, but lately she had been growing exceedingly closer.

_I wish it would just hurry up and happen already. The waiting is driving me insane._

Alex rolled out of bed, her bare feet hitting the floor. She glanced absently at the clock. 2:37. Damn, it was early. She had only left One Police Plaza four hours ago. A few more nights like this and she wouldn't have to worry about being interrupted in her sleep. She'd be out like a light.

She remembered belatedly that any work suitable clothes would be at the cleaners; she had dropped them off earlier. She slipped on a pair of comfortably worn-in jeans and a lace-edged black sweater, wrapped a grey scarf around her neck and shoved her feet into a pair of faded sneakers. Pulling her hair into a messy ponytail, she glanced at her reflection in the mirror. _Good enough._ She brushed her teeth and washed her face, grabbed her trench coat and purse and was out the door.

_Man,_ she thought as she pulled into the empty street, yawning hugely. _I've got to start turning my cell off._

………

The rookie on the perimeter actually took the time to read her badge information before lifting the tape for her. "Sorry, ma'am, it's just…" he trailed off. She knew that she didn't look like a cop in her street clothes, so she couldn't really fault him, but couldn't help but wonder who he thought that she was. It was three in the morning, in a deserted corner of Central Park. Who would she be besides a cop? In the distance she could see CSU's floodlights and the techs and detectives swarming over the banks of the river. She caught a glimpse of her partner's form as he knelt down to examine something.

It was just like him to be so awake. He was already rummaging around in the grass animatedly. As she neared, she could hear him mumbling something under his breath.

"What've you got?"

His eyes gave her a quick once over before flickering back down to the ground. "Unidentified female. Bike patrol found her an hour and a half ago. Looks like she was attacked from the front, wr…wrestled to the ground. Cause of death was blunt force trauma, but there're these, these laceration marks around her throat, here," he pointed to the angry red welts that circled her thin neck, "and here."

"'Lotta rage."

"Mm-hm. Look at all this, this blood." He swept his arms out. "She was hit once in the head, to incapacitate her. Then once she was out, he slit her wrists."

Alex, gloves recently snapped on, turned the girl's hands. "No hesitation marks."

"He's methodical. Calculating. He doesn't like overkill, doesn't like a mess. Just two quick, clean slices."

"Look at her, curled up like some sort of sleeping princess."

The girl was lovely. Her skin was the pale, smooth ivory of death, her limbs splayed about her dramatically. The silk dress that she wore was fitted in the dipping bodice and loose in the knee-length skirt. The folds of violet silk were hiked around her thighs. Her brown curls were spread around her head, gorgeous and thick. Even in death she was radiant in a pure, chaste kind of way. Her wrists had spilled blood onto the dark green of the leaves. It looked like a sort of painting: her body, posed in death, among ruby-colored roses, spattered with her crimson blood. It was ironic that he would chose to kill her in such a spot, beside the river where the wild roses grew. It looked like it should be a place for lovers' walks, not a bloody massacre.

"He was careful not to leave any marks," Bobby remarked. "He hit her with a dull object so that her head wouldn't bleed. It's… it's on the side of her head, so that her hair covers the damage." He probed the wound gently, moving aside the chestnut curls. "This girl was definitely… what do they call it? Made-over? recently. Her hair isn't like this naturally. It's starting to frizz at the roots, probably styled."

Alex walked to the body's other side, looking closely for any sort of clue. "Bumps on her legs, from shaving. She either wasn't used to doing it or wasn't used to doing it so often. She's got pale feet, characteristic of someone who wears sneakers often."

"Manicure, pedicure…" Bobby stated, glancing at her toe and finger nails.

"Her eyebrows were done, too."

Bobby raised his own eyebrows. "How can you tell?"

"What? Oh, the skin around them is lighter than the rest of her face. It's like your scalp, white because it's covered from the sun."

"Hm," was all he said in response. He pulled open her eyelids, touched her eyes carefully, and moved his finger in a little circle. "Contacts. She hasn't been wearing them long, her eyes are still a little red around the edges. They're not used to the solution that she cleans them in. She likes to read. She has dents on either side of her nose from reading glasses, and another set from normal glasses. Their fainter; she probably stopped wearing the everyday glasses when she got the contacts"

They were silent for a moment, looking over the body.

"Anything we miss?" he asked.

"What's that?" Alex knelt beside the body, staring at the woman's lips. The tip of something was poking out of her closed mouth. Reaching into a nearby tech's kit, she pulled out the forceps. Bobby watched as she inserted them into the girl's mouth and drew out…

"A rose." The petals, large and silky, were still fresh.

"The white rose represents innocence. P…purity of intent.

Alex threw her partner a look over the woman's body. "There's nothing pure about murder."


	2. Chapter 2

A/N. I just remembered that Bobby doesn't drive. Oh, well. Anyway, it took me awhile, but I'm updating! Let me just tell you that you're lucky, because I rarely, _rarely_ update multi-chapter fics that I've started. Just ask the Munchkins, I have, like, three that I haven't finished for them. Ho hum. I'll work on them over Christmas break, I guess. Can I just use this moment to soap-box a bit? Okay... VDO is teh sex! All right, I'm done now. On with the fic. BTW, I heart my reviewers.

………

Disclaimer: Don't own anything.By the time they left the crime scene, the sun was rising lazily over the edge of the skyscrapers, lighting the bustling streets with a cold luminosity. Alex caught a ride to One Police Plaza with Bobby, grabbing a few minutes of sleep on the way in. Her dream, the one she had had just earlier that night, was blissfully absent. As he pulled the car to a stop, Goren glanced over at her, curled up in his passenger seat. "Eames. Wake up. We're here." He shook her gently. She opened one eye blearily.

"Yeah," she said by way of letting him know that she was awake. She rubbed the back of her hand across her face.

"You been sleeping okay?"

"Fine. Why?"

"You've just been looking kind of tired lately is all."

"Nah. It's just the long hours. Ready?" she asked, stepping out of the car.

He chose to ignore the change of subject, and followed her silently into One Police Plaza.

………

Deakins perched on the edge of Alex's desk. "So. What've we got?"

Alex flipped open the file, which had arrived a few hours ago. "Female Jane Doe found in Central Park. Looks about twenty, twenty-one." She glanced at her partner; he inclined his head slightly in agreement.

"They're running her prints through the databases now. I'm not holding my breath, though," Alex said.

"And why's that?" her boss asked.

"No tattoos, visible scarring, or piercings, not even her ears. Most juveniles in the database are convicted offenders, and most have ink or piercings as a way of rebelling against parents, P.O.s, whoever. Too young to be armed forces. I suppose she could be a state or federal employee, maybe a paper pusher."

Bobby was leaning far back in his chair, staring pensively at the ceiling and rubbing his forehead thoughtfully. The crime scene photos were in his lap, but he just absently thumbed the edges. They had put a rush on the pictures; the lab had pumped them out sometime in the couple of hours that they had spent on paperwork. Bobby was lost, however, in his thoughts, brainstorming the case, as he often did, and the killer's motives.

_Purity of intent. Someone who cared about her, or at least an acquaintance. But there're obviously some underlying feelings of… what? Inadequacy? Narcissism? Hatred of women?_

Alex's phone rang softly on the desk in front of her. Picking up the receiver, she gave the customary, "Eames." After a few moments, she said, "All right. Be there soon." She replaced the phone to its cradle.

"Autopsy's up."

"That was fast," Deakins remarked

"Lucky for us," she said, her tone dripping sarcasm.

Bobby sighed, his thoughts interrupted.

_It's too soon to say. Maybe Rodgers can tell us more. _He hoisted himself out of the chair and grabbed his black leather folder. Likewise, Eames wordlessly gathered her coat and purse. They gave the captain identical nods, and headed out the door towards the morgue. Their steps fell perfectly in time with each others', side by side, matching expressions of calm, collected professionalism adorning their faces.

Deakins stared after them pensively. "Sometimes those two are so alike I wonder how they tell themselves apart," he remarked to no one. Well, there was work to be done, mountains of paperwork, hours of phone calls, and rookies to supervise. He retreated to his office, with an expression not unlike that of a man walking to the gallows. The joys of being a supervisor.

Boy, did he love his job.

………

When they arrived at the morgue, Rodgers was elbow-deep in the cadaver's innards. Catching the look they both sent her, the one that wordlessly asked, 'what the fuck?' she sighed.

"Sorry, sorry, apparently someone threw out the chart that had the organs' weights on it, so we have to do it over again." She shot one of the assistants with an absolutely scathing glance. The girl turned a brilliant shade of pink all the way up to the tips of her ears. "Body needs to be sealed up and shipped off by the end of the day. Family lives in Boston."

"You got a hit off of her prints, then?"

The M.E. nodded. "Mm-hm. Works at the public library. They take your prints when you apply. The database had a sample of her blood. They screened it for diseases when she applied for state medical insurance. We ran it. DNA is a match."

"To whom?"

"Emily Hawthorne." She passed Eames a sheet with the victim's picture and personal information.

"Eighteen. Younger than we thought." She shook her head before moving on. "She only moved here a year ago, right after graduation. Lives in an apartment on the Lower East side… whoa." Eames had flipped through to the picture. "Definitely _not _the same girl she was when this was taken." She passed her partner the head-shot, blown up from Hawthorne's driver's license. Grey-blue eyes peered out from under thick glasses, masked further by the straight bangs that shaded them. The girl's hair was a mass of what weren't really curls, just a bunch of kinky waves tied back in a ponytail. She wore no makeup, and gave the camera a half-hearted smile that didn't reveal any teeth. She was a plain looking girl, not ugly, but she hadn't been primped like the girl on the slab.

Rodgers' team of pathologists and assistance finally stepped back, their work done with. The ME stripped off her gloves and tossed them in the wastebasket before scrubbing her hands and snapping a clean pair on. "Cause of death wasn't blunt-force like I originally thought, it was exsanguination from slit wrists. As for the head would, he hit her just once. CSU recovered this at the scene." She hefted an evidence bag and removed a rock. "See how this fits, here?" The rock's shape perfectly matched the large purplish welt on the scalp.

"He hit her only once," Alex murmured.

Rodgers nodded. "First hit's a freebie. Usually doesn't bleed." She continued on in her perpetually fatigued-sounding voice. "Laceration marks around the neck and petechial hemorrhages in her eyes indicate strangulation. Also, the hyoid bone, that little U-shaped bone at the base of the throat, was fractured."

"Any way to tell the sequence of events?" Alex asked.

"I was just getting to that. Strangulation came first, depleting oxygen and blood flow to the brain. That's why the blood at the crime scene was so thin: once he let go of her neck, most of her hemoglobin rushed to the brain to repair any damage that a minute or two without air would have caused."

"Hemoglobin… red blood cells," Bobby mused.

Rodgers made a little sound of agreement. "That's why the head wound made such a clear impression. Because there was so much hemoglobin in her head, though, the blood everywhere else was thinner than usual. After she was down for the count, he cut her wrists at the radial artery and left her to bleed out. The process was faster than it normally would have been because of the thickness, or lack thereof. Still, it would have taken her at least two, maybe three hours to lose 40 of her blood. In a human her size, that's about 1.8 liters of the stuff."

Alex was piecing the time line together. "So, if they found her at two thirty, she probably died around… midnight?"

"Sounds about right," Rodgers agreed.

"So, the question becomes 'What would a plain-Jane librarian turned beauty queen be doing in Central Park in the middle of the night?'"

"That's your job. I just slice 'em."

"Th-thanks, doc." Goren turned to his partner. "Her apartment's on Jefferson. Want to take a ride?"

She flashed him that sardonic smile. "You ask like I have a choice."

"Well, you know, I aim to please."

"How chivalrous." Alex cast a glance over the corpse at Rodgers.

"I'll have the photos at your squad by the end of the day."

Alex raised a hand in thanks and slipped out the door, Bobby close on her heels.

"So, Goren, what d'you think?"

"Well, it wasn't overkill."

Alex raised her eyebrows. "The victim was strangled, sliced, and suffered from blunt-force trauma. That's not overkill?"

"Not when you think about it." He stopped in his tracks, ready to outline the whole scenario for her. "He used just enough force to achieve each desired goal. He needed to subdue her enough to get her to the ground, so he cuts off her air supply. He needs to knock her unconscious so that she doesn't escape, so he hits her once, to the back of the head, where the wound isn't visible. He used a smooth rock so that there wasn't any bleeding. Once she was out, he slit her wrists."

"I did notice that he cut _up_ the radial artery."

"Most suicides fail because they think that cutting across will be enough. The most efficient way to do it would be how he did, slicing along the major arteries of the arm to the elbow."

"It's a very passive form of murder, isn't it? Just a few quick slices and leave her there, the blood silently flowing out of her body."

Bobby pulled out the girl's autopsy photo. "Even if she had been able to, there was no one to hear her scream."

Eames shook her head at Emily's fate. "The city's a rough place." She paused for a moment. "You should get some rest."

"But her apartment…"

"It's almost six," she said. Her eyes, he thought, seemed to swallow him in their honey-colored depths at times like this, her compassion and worry, though unfounded, comforting. "You practically look dead yourself. Her apartment'll be there in the morning."

_The dead can wait._

He nodded, and they strodewordlessly out of the morgue, the building of dead, and into the still silence of the cold night.


End file.
